I finished my most boring project! (Study closet)

Let me remind you what this closet looked like before…

And now, after a little paint, trim, and a piece of plywood to hide the HVAC unit, it looks like this…

In a perfect world, I would have built-in shelves here that took advantage of every spare inch of space. But since this isn’t a perfect situation and I need to be able to easily move the shelves if the HVAC unit needs maintenance, I had to stick with these shelving units on wheels.

I was able to fit two of them in here. I’m not sure what I’m going to store in here yet. I still need to organize the entire studio, and for now, I think I’ll have more than enough storage space. So this could be a space I can grow into as I start using the studio.

Since I didn’t want to have a plain green wall, I decided to hang one of my acrylic art prints here to add some color and interest to an otherwise very boring space. I love opening the closet door and seeing that colorful print.

I had initially planned to add some shelves to the area on the right, but since I haven’t even filled the shelves I have, I decided to wait for now.

It was a pain to have to work with this mass of air ducts, so I did the best I could. It’s still not pretty, but at least I don’t have to look at the ugly side of an HVAC unit anymore. Adding this piece of plywood here and notching out the area for the ducts made an eyesore a little more tolerable.

And now, you have to go into the closet and look around the plywood to see the ugly HVAC unit.

I had planned to leave it like this when I showed you my progress last week. It looked like this…

But that was another thing my brain wouldn’t let me get past. I ended up covering the plywood box with a nicer piece of sanded plywood, adding some trim, and painting it to match.

I also ended up making the door frame the same as the other doors.

I didn’t do it because I couldn’t help myself. I was actually planning on doing a much simpler edge on the closet side of the door, but it turned out I didn’t have the wood on hand to do a simpler edge. However, it turned out I had what I needed to do this style in my scrap pile, so I did. It’s not the highest quality wood. It had been rained on and was warped, so I ran it through the planer a couple of times to make it look better. It’s fine for the inside of a storage closet, but I wouldn’t have used it in a prominent location in the house.

And then I made a quick and easy frame around the wall vent.

I really wanted to leave it unfinished, but I’m not like that. I don’t mind imperfections and not using the best quality materials inside a closet, but it turns out I don’t like leaving projects completely unfinished in a closet. Here’s what it looked like before…

And here it is now. I also used wood from my scrap pile for this. I wanted things to look finished, but I wanted to spend as little money as possible.

This is the area where I had originally planned to put some shelves, but I changed my mind because I have more than enough shelves for now. And I may need hooks to hang things instead of needing more shelves, so this is an ideal area for that. But for now, I don’t need any additional storage space.